More Reasons to Love the Stanford History Education Group: Civic Reasoning

I'm a bit of a Stanford History Education Group groupie, so you can imagine how delighted I was to learn that they have now added a series of lessons and assessments designed to help students get better at critically evaluating online information. Their new site, "Civic Reasoning Online," provides a series of assessments that measure students' "ability to judge the credibility of the information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computer screens.... These assessments show students online content—a webpage, a conversation on Facebook, or the comment section of a news article—and ask them to reason about that content." It tests what it calls Civic Online Reasoning's Core Competencies, which involve being able to evaluate the validity of information based on the following three questions: "who's behind the information?" "what's the evidence?" and "what do other sources say?"  It includes exercises in evaluating Wikipedia, claims on YourTube, Twitter and forms of social media, as well as evaluating website reliability.

You have to register to access the information, but registration is free, and they don't bombard you with emails.

The site joins their other excellent offerings: 

• Beyond the Bubble, 80 "easy-to-use assessments that measure students' historical thinking rather than recall of facts." 

• 
  the Reading Like a Historian curriculum, which "engages students in historical inquiry" with lessons that revolve "around a central historical question" and incorporate primary sources. It "teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence."

Reading Like a Historian has 91 U.S. History and 41 World History units. If there's a topic they don't cover, you might consider using the SHEG model to create your own. Glenn Wiebe breaks down how.

P.S. If you haven't yet completed our survey on how Montana history is being taught in your district, I hope you'll donate a few minutes to the cause and do so now.